Russia equips landing ship built more than a decade ago

This information was announced by Captain Igor Dygalo, representative of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Navy on June 12, the main ship of Project 11711 developed by the Nevsky Project Design Bureau was built at the Yantar Shipyard in Kaliningrad.

"This large landing ship will join the Russian Navy at the end of June this year," Captain Igor Dygalo said.

Russia tests Project 11711 Ivan Gren ship.

The second ship of Project 11711, Peter Morgunov, which was laid down in June 2015 and launched on May 25, 2018, is also being built at the Yantar shipyard. It is expected that Peter Morgunov will be transferred to the Russian Navy by the end of 2018, the representative added.

According to public information, the first ship was laid down on December 23, 2004. It took 8 years for the Ivan Gren landing ship of Project 11711 - the first large landing ship class that Russia built after the collapse of the Soviet Union - to be completed and launched.

But it took four years for the 5,000-ton ship to be completed and put into sea trials. However, despite the extremely long time it took to build a world-record warship, the Ivan Gren landing ship still encountered a series of technical errors that had to be refined before further testing.

According to the Vpered newspaper, the Ivan Gren landing ship of Project 11711 built by the Yantar plant in Kaliningrad has been suspended from factory trials.

"Ivan Gren has returned to the shipyard after being suspended from factory-level trials," the source said.

The reason given for this sudden decision was a problem with the ship's degaussing system. "The warship needs further research to improve the operation of the degaussing system," said Igor Leonov, head of the Yantar plant's manufacturing department.

This person also said that the problem with the demagnetization system's operation was not a fault of Yantar but was due to the initial design stage.

"Early errors in calculating the magnetic field with the warship led to this, and now it is necessary to adjust the demagnetization system," he said.

According to the original plan, the large landing ship Ivan Gren will be handed over to the Russian Navy by the end of 2016. This ship has a displacement of 5,000 tons and a maximum operating capacity of 30 days. It is 120m long, 16.5m wide and has a maximum speed of 18 knots, and can run continuously for nearly 8,000km, so it can easily perform tasks in large sea areas.

The ship can carry 13 main battle tanks or 36 armored personnel carriers or 300 marines. The ship is equipped with a 30mm six-barreled gun system and has two Kamov Ka-29 helicopter landing pads. Due to a series of problems with the Ivan Gren landing ship program, the Russian Navy once planned to "abandon" this record-breaking shipbuilding project.

However, after the Mistral landing ship deal between Russia and France fell apart while Moscow had no replacement ship, this was considered the reason why Russia continued to complete the final tests with the Ivan Gren ship to put it into service after 14 years of construction.